Author speaks at Hanover

Doris Kearns Goodwin has spent her career studying the lives of presidents. Abraham Lincoln has the greatest hold on her.

“He was the most fascinating president of all time,” she told an audience at the Hanover Theatre for the Performing Arts Thursday night. “He had an uncanny ability to empathize, shared credit with ease, learned from his mistakes” and after 150 years could still make the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian “laugh out loud with his stories.”

Goodwin described her enduring fascination with Lincoln as part of the UMass Medical School Distinguished Speaker series at The Hanover Theatre. She also commented on such diverse topics as Hollywood, baseball and Beltway politics before a crowd of history buffs who gave her a standing ovation.

While Lincoln had a total of 12 months of formal education scattered through a hardscrabble childhood, he expressed a beauty in language that belied this fact.

“It was if the Shakespeare he had studied alone as a child had worked its way into his soul,” she said.

Lincoln also had a sense of his place in history, according to Goodwin. When it came time to sign the Emancipation Proclamation, his hand was weak from greeting hundreds of well wishers at the White House.

“He said ‘if ever my soul was in an act, it is in this act. But if I sign with a shaking hand, posterity would say I hesitated’ so Lincoln waited until he could take up the pen and sign boldly,” she said.

Goodwin spent 10 years writing her award-winning book about Lincoln, “Team of Rivals,” and is convinced that fierce ambition helped carry the man through personal tragedy and professional challenges and failures.

During a severe depression in his early 30s brought on by his breakup with Mary Todd, the move out of state of his best friend Joshua Speed and political losses, he was suicidal.

Goodwin said: “Friends were so worried they removed all razors, knives and scissors from his room. His friend Joshua Speed told Lincoln he must rally or he would surely die. And Lincoln said he would just as soon die, but he hadn’t done anything to make any human being remember that he had lived. He was obsessed with wanting to accomplish something worthy in his life that would make the world a little better place for his having lived in it.”

The upset presidential victory of 1860 revealed Lincoln’s true political genius when against advice and popular opinion he chose to make his most serious rivals, William H. Seward, Salmon P. Chase, Edwin M. Stanton and Edward Bates, the core of his cabinet.

“He said these men are the strongest, most able people in the country and I will need them by my side,” she explained.

According to Goodwin, President Barack Obama cited “Team of Rivals” when selecting his former adversary Hillary Clinton as secretary of state. “People claim I wrote this book with Obama in mind, which is impossible since I didn’t know who he was when I was writing it,” she said.

“Team of Rivals,” published in 2005, also caught the attention of Hollywood and is being made into a major motion picture due out next year. “Lincoln,” directed by Steven Spielberg, will star Daniel Day-Lewis and Sally Field.

“I just came back from Richmond and it is so exciting to see a whole group of actors called into action based on what I wrote,” she said. “Daniel Day-Lewis is Lincoln.”

Besides Lincoln, Goodwin has written “The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys,” “No Ordinary Time,” about the partnership between Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt, which won the 1995 Pulitzer Prize, and “Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream.”

She describes Johnson as a “crazy character,” who she suspects may haunt her in the afterlife for spending so much time on Lincoln.

As a 24-year-old White House fellow, Goodwin gained access to Johnson, and reported on his fading days after he left the White House. Goodwin said the invitation was particularly surprising since she had written a scathing article on the president, asking for his removal from office. But Johnson was committed to changing her opinion on him as much as he was dedicated to political friendships with ideological opposites, something in short supply today, she said.

Goodwin called the current political culture “the worst I have seen in 40 years,” and invoked the gods of baseball to help end the gridlock. “Something has to make this divide diminish. If the Red Sox win again there has to be an end to partisanship,” Goodwin laughed.

An “irrational member” of Fenway nation, who wrote about her love of baseball in her memoir “Wait til Next Year,” Goodwin said she couldn’t wait this year for the September drubbing to end. “In 2004, the Red Sox played like boys who loved the game and had fun playing,” she said. “At a certain point this year, the team lost that spirit. We still have an incredible array of talent in the lineup. We just need to get them playing like a team again,” she said. “Not like a team of rivals.”